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Toronto’s Hotel X gives a self-taught photographer the ‘gig of a lifetime’

If there’s anything the just-opened Hotel X Toronto has in spades, it’s views.

Sprouting 30 floors up from the very southern stub of the Canadian National Exhibition grounds, its rooftop pool peers down achingly at the mass of boats bobbing in the summer lake blueness, while offering the ideal vantage point to watch planes gliding to and fro from Billy Bishop Airport.

Wind around some more on the same deck — as is the vantage point from so many of the rooms in the 404-suite hotel — and you’ll see a thicket of green, but also an easterly view of the forest of downtown towers that, because of the hotel’s marriage of height and location, is all-new, even to the life-long Torontonian.

With that kind of competition, it may be remarkable that anyone at the hotel is even talking about the art. But, oh, they are: the miscellany of bold photography (nearly 800 shots) taken by one person, and specifically commandeered to show natural sites in countries ranging from China to Iceland, South Africa to Bolivia. Unprecedented, as far as hotel commissions go.

“A gig of a lifetime” is how the fella behind the project, Neil Dankoff, puts it mildly.

More like the dream gig of dream gigs.

Specializing in work that is hyperrealist and outsized in scale — using multiple exposures and multiple focal points — the landscape pro (raised in Montreal, based now in Toronto) was afforded two years to travel the world to take the pics, specifically for this, Toronto’s “only lakefront urban resort.” Every room, every floor. And though he figured the site would want to double up on some photos, the developer of the hotel, Henry Kallan, who is also the president of the group behind the project, The Library Hotel Collection, tsk-tsk’ed the very notion.

“I would never put up two of the same photo in my own house,” Kallan told him, as the photographer relates now.

Standing in the gallery of his work that also now sits on the lobby level of Hotel X — eyes ablaze behind his Armani glasses, and his overall countenance giving off a kind of Jonathan Franzen-ness — Dankoff points out a number of highlights.

There, for instance, is the Bamboo Forest in Japan (“always on my bucket list”). There, oh, is the beach in Hawaii where “the black sand was formed by a lava flow that cooled.” There — wow — is a panoramic pic taken high, high above Central Park, from a northern exposure, that is unlike all the other 3 million photos you’ve seen of Central Park. He got rooftop access of a place owned by a friend of a friend, and “waited basically three days to get that shot.”

Every floor of the hotel takes in a different location. Croatia, for instance, covers the seventh floor. Bolivia’s got the eighth.

The more interesting subtext behind Dankoff’s work — made evident, the longer you talk to him — is that it’s less about the blinking wanderlust, and more about his own stasis for so long. A rumination, you might say, on his own disinterest in travel until an awakening happened, right at the cusp of middle-age.

“I never travelled. I had no interest,” he starts to tell me. “Basically, I only ever went to Florida,” where his grandmother had a place.

“When I used to watch Price is Right as a kid, and they would choose the vacation (as the prize), I would be like: ‘no, no, don’t bid on that one! Bid on the fridge! Bid on the car!’”

Why is that?

“A lot had to do with camp (he went every summer as a kid). When some other people travelled, I only wanted to do camp. It was as good as it gets: how I thought. I think it stuck in my head.”

Israel was his appetite-whetting, travel-wise. Then, he got the itch. Then, he couldn’t stop.

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Getting in touch with his inner Kerouac — “but no matter, the road is life,” right? — and succumbing, possibly, to the theory once circumscribed by celebrated travel writer Paul Theroux that “travel is flight and pursuit in equal parts,” Dankoff also couldn’t stop taking photos. The guy who bought his first digital camera in 1997 — an early-adopter, pretty much — quips that he met the love of his life three years ago when he made it official with a Pentax 645D. (These days, he primarily uses Phase One, a Danish brand specializing in high-end digital photography.)

“It’s my yoga,” he quips about the process, telling me that his ideal time to shoot is 20 minutes before sunrise. He loves those moments when he’s setting up in the dark, waiting for things to unfold.

Entirely self-taught — and encouraged to fully pursue photography after a past life working in the “pet industry,” which he hated — Dankoff has inevitably taken to sharing his passion with his kids. For a recent father-daughter bat mitzvah trip, he took his daughter to Amsterdam — the remnants of which are captured in photos here. He points one out — Amsterdam’s famous canals in view.

“Did you take her to Anne Frank’s house?” I ask.

That was the plan ... but it turns out it’s being renovated, and because of that, tickets were sold out four months in advance, so they only visited the outside. As is often the case with photos, what’s not in it is sometimes as important as what is.

Asked to name his favourite image, he points to a moody one from Guilin, China — all mountains and clouds and rice paddies. “It’s actually 12 different photos ... plus three different focal points.”

So where to next?

The one-time travelphobe says Greece is on the docket. He’s packing his bags.

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